Laura Bush
Diplomat
By BRENDAN MINITER
July 14, 2007; Page A7
THE WHITE HOUSE -- "The first lady's record is -- or nearly always is -- better than the president's, because she doesn't have every difficult issue."
Laura Bush is in her East Wing office discussing the role a first lady should play. She's wearing a dark suit with white-stitch trim and sitting on a couch facing shelves stacked with children's books. She has just hinted at the frustration that must come as her husband, President George W. Bush, is attacked in the media.
"Because I do know him, it's easier for me to discount the terrible things that I read and see," Mrs. Bush says. She also understands the political facts of life, she adds, "because we've been in politics for almost our entire married life and because I saw somebody else I loved in this job, my father-in-law."
Mrs. Bush has done what few others in the administration have managed to do over the past six years: She's remained very popular with the American people. She draws crowds at events; her approval ratings have been consistently high, hitting 85% at one point, the highest ever for a first lady. With her natural grace and wit, she has been described as "the most popular Republican in the country."
In our conversation Mrs. Bush laments that "it's too bad" that politics can be so barbarous because that can discourage good people from running for office. Then she adds with a laugh, "Although, I will say that it hasn't discouraged a whole lot of people who are running for president."
Mrs. Bush is now increasingly in the spotlight and spending her political capital on the president's foreign policy initiatives outside the Middle East. She has made 14 solo foreign trips as first lady, nine of them after Mr. Bush's second inaugural address, outlining his freedom agenda. She's also visited Afghanistan promoting women's rights since the U.S. liberated that nation from the Taliban in 2001.
Mrs. Bush has also taken a lead in speaking out for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, a democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner in Burma who won elections in 1990, but who has been kept under house arrest by a military junta. Mrs. Bush has made Burma a priority in part because the military junta has a budding relationship with another repressive Asian regime, North Korea.
The first lady doesn't hesitate to criticize China for trade that is keeping the Burmese regime in business. "China does have a huge amount of influence over Burma," she says. "They share a border, for one thing. But also, they . . . use the natural resources out of Burma," and in the end "they prop up a government that -- a failed state, really, is what they're propping up, just like in the Sudan." Mrs. Bush adds that "right now, after cooperating with China in the six-party talks with North Korea, and with the Chinese Olympics coming up, I think this is a really good time for activists and advocates for Burma and the Sudan and other countries to put pressure on China."
If this doesn't sound like the literacy advocate many Americans have come to know in Mrs. Bush, it's also not the kind of first lady she expected to be. Coming into office in 2001, "I couldn't have forecast that we'd have terrorism, that there would be such an international focus for me. I think I really expected -- and to be perfectly frank, so did the president -- that this would be a domestically focused presidency."
Mrs. Bush has just returned from a tour of four African countries last month. There she highlighted programs President Bush launched in 2003 with a surprise call in the State of the Union Address to spend $15 billion fighting HIV. He now wants to spend $30 billion over the next five years fighting the disease.
Since 2003, the State Department estimates, more than 100,000 mother-to-child HIV infections have been prevented and more than a million people are taking anti-retroviral drugs thanks to President Bush. The first lady is optimistic about the prospects for further progress.
"Something definitely can be done about these diseases," she says. "I mean, they literally could be eradicated with change of behavior -- AIDS, too. If people -- if everyone knew their status, and protected their partner, then in a generation you could not have it. But obviously, that's very difficult, as we know from our own numbers."
In listening to Mrs. Bush talk about the details of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) and malaria initiative, I wondered if combating disease is one area where she influenced him.
But she seems to anticipate the question: "I don't really know exactly how it all started," she volunteers, "that the Pepfar and the president's Malaria Initiative and those initiatives became initiatives that I worked on so much. They were really his ideas. He was the one, before the 2003 State of the Union, [who] said, I'm going to make this proposal that we focus on HIV in Africa and other countries -- the 15 hardest-hit countries, which include Haiti and Vietnam, as well. But then the others are sub-Saharan Africa.
"And what's really happened is that he announced those things, he got the Congress to pass those things and fund them, and then I got to be the one to get to go visit them and see them, because he just, frankly, hasn't had the time to do that, because he is focused so much on other issues -- obviously the war in Iraq."
Mrs. Bush nudges the conversation along toward a point she wants to make: Fighting disease in poor countries also pays other tangible benefits, including expanding economic growth and liberating women. Sometimes this happens with the smallest of projects -- like providing clean drinking water to a school:
"Especially the economic part of it, the girls who are kept out of school because they are the ones looking for water, or . . . have to walk however far to the water well and bring it back, and so they aren't in school. And that's one of the reasons the clean water, the PlayPumps [merry-go-round water pumps] that we inaugurated in Zambia are very important -- and they're in a schoolyard -- so that if girls don't have to search for water for their families, they're more likely to be educated."
If reporters pay close attention to what she says and follow up on it, they are likely to find that Mrs. Bush is willing to take controversial stands. On her recent flight to Africa, she told journalists traveling with her that the U.S. needs to be "efficient and effective" with foreign aid money. No one on the plane asked what she meant.
For one thing, she supports using the most effective defense ever developed against malaria -- an insecticide called DDT, which has been vilified by environmentalists even though it was essential to eradicating the disease in the U.S. decades ago.
"[W]e went overboard in the United States, used it in huge applications, big agricultural applications. I mean, people . . . remember running after the DDT trucks, where they would just drive up and down in the summer to spray for mosquitoes," she said. "And that is not what this spraying is. This is spraying inside, just against the walls of a house, so that if a mosquito flies into the walls, then they die from the insecticide."
Has her Africa diplomacy been effective?
A recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, which interviewed hundreds of people in 10 sub-Saharan countries, indicates that it might be. The U.S. is extremely popular in that part of the world. More than 60% of the people in every country surveyed except Tanzania have a positive impression of the U.S. In the Ivory Coast, 88% of the people have favorable views of America.
In deciding how to handle the role of first lady, Mrs. Bush says she has looked for guidance to other women who have held the job: "Lady Bird Johnson, for instance, who is one of my favorites." She also cites Jacqueline Kennedy.
"[E]veryone, I think, my age remembers Jackie Kennedy and her -- when President Kennedy was assassinated -- her grace. I think everyone who's my age remembers that, associates that with her, mostly her bravery and her courage and the tragedy of it."
She adds, "And then, of course, I have a mother-in-law who was first lady." Mrs. Bush thinks that has been "a huge advantage for me, and for George, really. Because when George was governor, I had the role model of Barbara Bush as first lady. . . . I saw how you can really have a life, which people don't believe, that you really can, and how you have a normal family life in the White House. And we certainly did when we came to visit them, and we've been able to have that ourselves. Agents don't stand around in our living room."
As for Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Bush won't comment on any of the candidates running for president, other than to say "I'm for the Republican, whoever that is. I will be campaigning for the Republican."
Will she follow in the footsteps of her predecessor as first lady and run for office herself? The idea forces her to laugh. "No. No."
So what role does she think a first lady should play? In asking the question I thought Mrs. Bush might give the safe answer, that she should support the president. But Mrs. Bush opted for a slightly more surprising response: "Whatever first ladies are interested in."
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.
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